


midwinter

by notcaycepollard



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Winter, myth, wolf girls with sharp teeth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 09:28:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7262413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcaycepollard/pseuds/notcaycepollard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey doesn’t notice the light at first, not really.</p><p>The light on the island is different. She notices that. More blue-gray in the spectrum, colder, but then anything is colder than the searing desert sun of Jakku.</p>
            </blockquote>





	midwinter

Rey doesn’t notice the light at first, not really.

The light on the island is different. She notices that. More blue-gray in the spectrum, colder, but then anything is colder than the searing desert sun of Jakku.

It’s not so cold as the stark whiteness of Starkiller Base. She thinks about the forest, and then tries not to.

In the mornings, she starts feeling sluggish. A kind of soul-eating weariness she’d never felt even in the worst days of working to survive. Maybe it’s a vitamin deficiency? But she’s eating every day, whole portions from the Resistance stores, and Luke cooks grilled fish, soup rich with seaweed broth. Her teeth aren’t loose and bloody in her gums the way they were that one bad time. Her hair’s not falling out. She even bleeds every month. But the air is cold all day, and it sinks chill into her bones. Even in the cave at night, she can’t ever quite get properly warm.

 _I’m going to sleep on the Falcon_ , she thinks about saying, but Luke was very serious about this cave and what it means. Rey tilts her chin up, proud, and pulls her jacket tighter, and does not complain.

Finally the light is so low she can’t help but notice. Dark at night long before they fall asleep, dark in the mornings. She finds herself wishing she could curl herself up into the soft deep warmth of her bedroll and sleep for a hundred years, emerge blinking under a desert sun hot on her skin.

“Rey,” Luke says, a little impatient. “Rey, get up.”

“It’s _dark_ ,” Rey whines, petulant like a child. Luke frowns.

“It’s winter,” he says like it’s obvious. “Of course it’s dark.”

Rey doesn’t know what that means. _Winter_ , she knows the word, a seasons word she learned from an old Core World droid she’d patched together, but it has no meaning for a desert-raised girl. There’s the wet and the dry, and the wet is short and hot and drenching. Things grow in a night, and Rey digs in the sand, eats flowers and vines and damp white roots. Once, something poisonous, and she’d shivered and sweated and retched until it’d leached its way out of her. She knows what to avoid, now.

“Does winter mean dark?” she scowls. “I don’t like it.”

“It’s the balance of things, Rey,” Luke says absently, and then looks at her again, sharper. She can feel his sudden memory soft around her. He was desert-raised too, once, under suns that never dropped low. He remembers what it was like to never feel this sluggish dark of the soul.

“There’s a story, about winters,” he starts, and sits down next to her. “There was a young woman, once. A queen of her planet.”

“Which planet?” Rey asks, interested in anything that means not getting out of bed for another five minutes. Luke smiles like he knows what she’s doing.

“Naboo,” he says. “A core world. Somewhere where the light is always soft and warm. Lush with green and with water and with beautiful things. Flowers, always. Where she walked, the flowers would grow up behind her.”

“She was Jedi?”

“Women weren’t Jedi, then. But she was full of light and joy and power, and her mother loved her so very, very much.”

When Rey thinks _mother_ , she sees someone with Leia Organa’s face. Not her mother but the closest she has, maybe.

“What happened to her?”

“A Sith Lord saw her in a meadow. He fell in love with her, and took her away to his home, deep in a dark system, to be his bride.”

“He _stole_ her,” Rey says, mouth bitter, because she understands what that means. Force tricks flooding through her body and her mind, and a figure in black robes, a mask, a face that could have been sweetly handsome if not so full of twisted rage. In her thoughts he tastes like rusted metal and old blood.

“They say he was death, or the god of it, or so full of dark side power it was so close as to make no difference,” Luke says. “Her mother had power, too. With her daughter lost, she wielded Force over the planet. Plants withered, crops lost. Months of cold and darkness and despair.”

“She was desperate,” Rey says, knowing she would do the same for Finn, if she lost him. For any of the people she loves, now.

“She was. Her people appealed to the Jedi. They went in envoy to the Sith, and demanded the queen’s return.”

“He wouldn’t let her go.”

“He claimed she had eaten his food. Six seeds from a fruit of his world. The juice still stained her teeth.” Rey nods. She understands this. She ate Unkar Plutt’s portions, and that meant he owned her, until she could work off her debt. Perhaps there was no debt this nameless queen could work off.

“The Jedi agreed. They discussed it among themselves. Came to a ruling. The queen could return to Naboo, but she belonged to that Sith world too. A month, every year, for every seed she had eaten. The way the story goes, the reason for winter, it’s when she descends into that world and her mother mourns for her. A cold world, dark and chill and dreary without her. Until the world blooms again at her reappearance.”

“That’s not _fair_ ,” Rey protests. “He kidnapped her. She could only survive.”

“There were no women in the Jedi to speak for how a woman survives,” Luke says, sounding tired. “All they knew was the law. She had to return.”

“I would _never_ go back,” Rey says, fierce and determined and full of clutching horror at the thought of it.

“Some people say that she loved him,” Luke says, quiet. “That she returned every year for her love. To seek him out in the darkness. The bride of the god of death, as dark as he is.”

“How could you _love_ a thing like that,” Rey bites out, and tastes bile. Luke is silent for a long minute.

“Perhaps she pities him,” he suggests. “Perhaps she understands his loneliness, brings light to the darkness. Warmth to ease the cold. Perhaps it’s just the way of things.”

“I would destroy him,” Rey says. He _kidnapped_ her, she thinks. Kidnapped her and covered it in a face of love gone wrong and twisted. _I would tear his throat out with my teeth._ Luke sighs.

“You cannot destroy death any more than you can destroy the dark side, Rey,” he tells her, weary. “You can only bring balance. Seek compassion, little one, and you will shine such a light that the dark within yourself has no space to fester and grow.”

“Maybe death isn’t always darkness,” Rey says, considering. “Maybe they’re wrong about him being the god of death. Perhaps _she’s_ death. The kind that ends wrong things.” Rey has done it before. A scavenger fallen from a high place, head shattered open and back snapped, the kind of injuries that only ever end in death dragged out over long moments. The scavenger was awake, though, and that made it worse. Eyes glazed over with shock, but still clinging painfully and terribly to life. Rey had even known this woman, a little, when she was young. She’d considered her face, and squeezed her hand, and then hit her just once, very hard and very fast, staff against skull. The kind of mercy the desert doesn’t always have space for.

“Perhaps,” Luke agrees, and Rey knows it’s true. Someday, she’ll wrap herself in the kind face of death, light-drenched and powerful, and she will greet its usurper with a smile, and she will deliver the killing blow. Compassion, and balance, and the universe righting itself. That queen of the story could still bloom like a desert after rain, skin gleaming with light and teeth still stained with fruit or blood, if she delivered death like that.

“It’s a good story,” Rey says, considering it. Huddles down into her blankets like Luke might change his mind about training. “But right now I’m still cold. And it’s still _dark_.”

“I know,” Luke says, laughing, and tucks his cloak around her shoulders. “But tomorrow, it will be lighter.”


End file.
